By RENO OMOKRI
The piece you will soon be reading was first published on Sunday, April 19, 2020, in my column, #TheAlternative, on Sunday ThisDay. Today, 365 days later, and on another third Sunday in April, my words appear to have turned full circle in Oby Ezekwesili’s life.
As at the time it was published, the piece below went viral, with people giving me feedback to the effect that I hit the nail on the head. But there were a few others, who felt that I was too harsh on Oby.
To those few, I hope you have followed the events of the last week, as Oby Ezekwesili has been outed by one of the attack dogs she and Mallam Nasir El-Rufai groomed to use against real and imagined enemies, and almost burned down Nigeria in the process of actualising their plan to return to power by tarring the Jonathan administration.
The revelations are sordid, and should not even be mentioned in decent company.
The worm that Oby fed until it became a snake has now turned against her. Meanwhile, both former President Jonathan, and those who remained loyal to him, despite the unrelenting barrage of lies from Oby’s surrogates, keep soaring higher.
Despite her snake’s petition, Dr. Mrs Ngozi Okonjo Iweala is now the Director General of the World Trade Organisation.
The only thing her former snake has not said concerning her is that he saw her nakedness, and slept with her, and even fathered her twins. Well, knowing how vile and dirty they both are, it may yet get to that point. Both of them have neither shame nor decorum.
How could anyone have risen so high, only to fall so low? It is the same old story from the celestial to the physical. Lucifer wanted to be God, and ended up as a fallen angel. She wanted to be Ngozi Okonjo Iweala so badly. Wanting to be where God has not placed her, and hating those who are where she wants to be, and being willing to bring them down, no matter how low she has to go to achieve her aim.
But I knew what and who Oby is and I warned Nigerians. The only reason she is embittered about the Buhari administration is because El-Rufai became a Governor, Hadiza became head of the Nigerian Ports Authority, and their various monster children of hate became commissioners, board members, and contractors. While she got-NOTHING!
In my Number One bestselling book, Facts Versus Fiction: The True Story of the Jonathan Years: Chibok, 2015 and the Conspiracies, I said that the Chibok abduction actually occurred, but that it was knowingly allowed to happen by forces within the All Progressives Congress, as part of moves to de-market the Jonathan administration, and that Oby Ezekwesili’s #BringBackOurGirls was a willing tool for the de-marketing of former President Jonathan. Unfolding events are now vindicating me.
I am under no illusion that former President Jonathan was a saint. He had his flaws, one of which was allowing persons like Chief E K Clark and others speak for him, almost as his alter ego, without calling them to order. But on a scale with his predecessors and successor, I cannot find any Nigerian President or Head of State who meant as well for Nigeria and Nigerians, as he did, and who took action towards making life better for the people.
Dr. Jonathan did not deserve what Buhari, Nasir El-Rufai, and Oby Ezekwesili conspired to do to him. And all of them will reap what they showed, in this lifetime, and in the one to come.
This verse is just so apt: “For God is not mocked: whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap.”-Galatians 6:7.
Enjoy reading it again below.
How APC Used Oby Ezekwesili, Rubbished Her, Then Dumped Her Like a #CoronaVirus Infected Cloth
Do not be fooled. Oby Ezekwesili, for all her religious pretensions, is a self-righteous hypocrite. I know this because I have incontrovertible proof that lays her hypocrisy bare.
Oby is a woman that loves to criticise others, but cannot stand to be criticised. While I was one of President Jonathan’s spokesmen, I watched her criticise my boss using polite and impolite language.
Then one day, I saw her respond to criticism by another person against her, and all hell broke loose. She attacked me like a mother hen whose chickens were under threat and promised to report me to my boss. You can imagine! Reporting me to the very same authority she had been undermining. How rich! Typical Oby.
And then I wrote a parable tweet directed at someone who is now serving in Buhari’s government and called that person a ‘wicked stepmother’. The narcissism of Oby then came to fore. She insisted that she was the one I was referring to (she was not!) and then she savaged me again.
Throughout the time that Dr. Goodluck Jonathan was President of Nigeria and after his tenure, this woman verbally assaulted him, sometimes using the most savage and impolite terms.
I later got informed that her grouse was not really about President Jonathan, but instead about Dr. Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who she felt had left her behind. That is a tale for another day.
Oby cannot deny that she was used by the All Progressives Congress to undermine the Jonathan administration and rise to power. She and her co-travellers in her Bring Back Our Girls movement were celebrated by the APC itself as “our members”.
On October 15, 2014, a major chieftain of the APC, who later became Minister of Agriculture under the party had said at the Presidential declaration of General Muhammadu Buhari as follows: “We commend the #BringBackOurGirls movement led by members of this party”.
Moreover, on March 6, 2014, Oby Ezekwesili was the keynote speaker at the first-ever All Progressives Congress Economic Summit, an event at which she did not lose the opportunity to savage the person and administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
At that time, she had some considerable credibility, which she then used to further the campaign and candidacy of then-candidate Muhammadu Buhari. Oby cannot deny that her public and private utterances and behaviour convinced many of her followers to support the APC in 2015.
And then the APC won the 2015 Presidential election, after which General Buhari was sworn in on May 29, 2015. A year later, he appointed Hadiza Bala Usman, co-founder of Oby Ezekwesili’s Bring Back Our Girls movement as the Managing Director of Nigerian Ports Authority, in keeping with Ogbeh’s proclamation that the BBOG was “led by members of this party”.
I am a researcher and a keen watcher of the APC and its government, and I can tell you that it was not until it became clear to Oby Ezekwesili that she was not going to get any appointment from the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, that she turned on him and began to criticise his administration.
Oby cannot claim altruism. She wanted a job badly. We know she is over-ambitious. When it was clear she would not get a job, she opted to run for the Presidency in 2019 against her previous benefactor, Buhari. She refused to step down for a more electable candidate.
Her then running mate, Gani Galadima, said that Oby was never serious about her Presidential run and that ‘Dr. Obiageli ‘Oby’ Ezekwesili only wanted to use the platform of the ACPN to negotiate to be Nigeria’s finance minister.’ His words, not mine.
Now, I urge Nigerians to situate her criticism of the Jonathan administration against these facts and in retrospect, you begin to see Oby for what she truly is.
And this has now been further corroborated by the allegation made against her by Bello El-Rufai, the son of the Kaduna state Governor, who accused her of being a beggar while stating that he has dates and receipts for her beggary.
The younger El-Rufai’s words were as follows “I’ll attach receipts later and begging days’.
Even sadder still was the fact that this young man who used to call Oby Ezekwesili as ‘Aunty Oby’ reverently, simply addressed her as Oby! Look how low she has fallen in the esteem of those who used and dumped her. She celebrated the young man when he disrespectfully called the sitting President of Nigeria ‘Ebele’, now she is aghast when he turns on her.
Oby should be aware that a slave who laughs when the man fighting for his emancipation is killed and buried in a shallow grave should expect no sympathy when the same or worse is done to him. What has Bello El-Rufai said to Oby that is not as bad as what he said against former President Jonathan, which Oby Ezekwesili herself tolerated and even celebrated?
I have tweets made by Oby, where she insulted former President Jonathan. She has now deleted some of those tweets. If Oby felt that those tweets were Godly and justified, why did she delete them? (I still have them). Her deletion is evidence that she knew she was out of line. She does not have the moral authority to call Bello El-Rufai out.
I have taken great pains to chart Oby’s celebration by the All Progressives Congress, and her denigration by the same party, so that my readers will see clearly that Oby is not a victim. She is an enabler. A scorned woman. And anything she says going forward about either former President Jonathan, or the incumbent Muhammadu Buhari, should be seen in that light.
Bello’s mum, Hadiza El-Rufai, is indeed right. Oby almost literally sowed the wind. She is now reaping the whirlwind. No one should intervene. Let Oby reap what she has sown. It will teach other Quislings a lesson. A saboteur is deserving of the treatment she gets from those in whose interest she sabotaged the people.
According to Transparency International (of which Oby Ezekwesili is one of the co-founders), Nigeria is now much more corrupt as a nation than we ever were in 2015 (think Babachir, think Buhari raising up Ganduje’s hands, think of the $25 billion worth of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation contract awarded without due process, think of Aisha Buhari’s ADC).
Ask yourself this question: If an organisation, co-founded by Oby, has come out with this fact, why is Oby not savaging Muhammadu Buhari in the same way she attacked former President Jonathan? She may be uttering some token noises, but her tone, volume and angst is nothing compared to how she savaged then President Jonathan.
Oby weaponised Chibok against the Jonathan administration. Why did she not do the same with the multiple abductions that have occurred under this administration? I have toured the whole world for the #FreeLeahSharibu campaign, and people have wondered about the lack of interest by Oby in this unfortunate incident.
According to the World Poverty Clock and the World Economic Forum, Nigeria is now the world headquarters for extreme poverty. You can imagine if this occurred under Jonathan. Oby would have screamed out her favourite catchphrase: O-K-O-K-O-B-I-O-K-O! Instead, she is subdued.
Oby reminds me of what Ezeulu said about Nnabenyi in Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel, Arrow of God. Ezeulu described people like Nnabenyi as “rats gnawing away at the sole of a sleeper’s foot, biting and then blowing air on the wound to soothe it, and lull the victim back to sleep”.
Oby gnawed away at then President Jonathan, and when her false criticism has done the damage she expected, she began to use her words to whitewash the Buhari administration, and its kitchen cabinet members, like Malam Nasir El-Rufai, until it became clear to her that they were not willing to trust a snake like her, who used its venom on an innocent man.
Meanwhile, the Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, that she was so jealous of continues to soar and soar, while the likes of Oby have been exposed as beggars, of whom their receipts have been kept for such a time as this.
Can you just imagine! Former Special Adviser to the President. Former Minister of Solid Minerals. Former Minister of Education. Former World Bank Vice President. Former co-founder of #BringBackOurGirls, reduced to ‘beggar with receipt’ by those for whom she savaged former President Jonathan and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala! By a boy young enough to be her last born.I just hope others will learn from Oby and not allow excessive ambition to be their undoing. Look at how she has been reduced. If I had said that about Oby, she would have taken me to town. But she is unusually silent over the beggar accusation. I wonder why?
Finally, let me add that 5 days ago, Oby Ezekwesili gave a Twitter live video in which she claimed that she was offered a ministerial appointment by former President Jonathan, but she turned it down. I spoke to former President Jonathan and asked him about this and this is his response: “That is not true! Who spoke with her? Definitely not me”. Oby Ezekwesili is, not surprisingly, a liar!
Reno’s Nuggets
Everything shines when it is its time, whether the sun, the moon, the stars or a comet. Take yourself for example. You don’t put on your house lights during the day time, because it is not the right time. You too will shine. Your time is coming soon! Therefore, go where life takes you, but don’t break when life shakes you. Dead leaves fall when the wind blows the tree. You are not a DEAD leaf. You are a DEAR leaf. You add life to the tree. You have value. You are an asset, not a liability. Be encouraged!